I am into collecting slightly obsolete audio gear, I've spent maybe $600 on the hobby in the last six months.
I know some people would think $120 is a lot for a minidisc player since you can get a flash player for so much less. Other people would think it's a trivial amount of money. Like all these things it comes in multiple scales: back in the day there were people who would spend 50x that on audio gear (there are some $20,000 speaker sets that sound great)
I don't expect to impress anybody: the last person I showed my portable minidisc player was a professor in the music department who's won one more than one Grammy award and teaches sound engineering who I ran into at the bus stop and his comment is "God, how can you listen to something compressed like that?" ("... yeah, I've been wondering about some of the coding tools they use.")
We are probably going to have some people over for a party and I don't expect many people to notice the difference with the 5.1 DTS discs I have in my CD changer but I do.
Used ones cost slightly less than they cost new, particularly considering inflation.
I started watching Techmoan and similar YouTubers. I have some nostalgia for compact cassettes and saw a video where they used a Dolby S deck and metal tapes and made very good recordings... Hardware like that came in around the time I was in grad school and went into a hole so it was "better than I remembered". There are Dolby S decks on the market for prices that seem within reach but the metal tapes are like $40 a piece now.
Optimal cassettes might sound as good or better than minidisc but rewinding is a hassle. They still make cassette decks and tapes but they are much worse than what was made 30 years ago. With NetMD you can record audio from your computer to a MD the same way you do with a computer which is easy: there's something to say for media that let you record your own music so you aren't stuck with what got released on SACD or can find on vinyl (which isn't too bad.)
It still seems silly when I've got several devices in my backpack usually that can play music including the Tracfone I use for emergencies.
I’ve been tempted to dig out my minidisc recording deck and player from storage, and use them for to add a bit of friction for more constrained listening. I’m probably projecting other problems onto music streaming services, but I often shut down with the endless choices and frustratingly flippant auto-generated playlists. Of course I can, and do, curate playlists for specific moods and tasks, but I also seem to lack self-control these days to not jump to another music tangent without getting lost from my original intent.
The nostalgia/quaintness of burning/updating a dozen or so minidiscs seems like an “fun”enough construct to build a deliberate ritual that outweighs the friction—similar to friction of making a pour over coffee helps force a nice 10min break and tends to limit number of cups/day to something reasonable. Either way, just more of a thought exercise at the moment.
In my case it is YouTube I am trying to get away from. Really listening to music on YouTube is a pretty good experience, it is great for discovery, and it even does a good job of making mixes for me. For many reasons though I don't want to be plugged into it and I try to listen to files on my computer, jellyfin or minidisc when I use my computer.
Upstairs I have a home theater receiver, I also have one downstairs where the HDMI out is burned out but it is good for music. I have an XBOX ONE plugged upstairs and it works for games but it seems to get worse all the time as a media player, it doesn't even play CDs although it plays DVD and Bluray. Upstairs I have the minidisc player for stereo music and one of these
which is connected to the receiver with an optical cable and is full of 5.1 DTS discs which I am a huge fan of. There are some good 1970s quad recordings such as Fragile by Yes but also a lot of good stuff in the the 2000-2010 period such as Supernature by Goldfrapp and some artists like Donald Fagan who always believed in multichannel. Like stereoscopic cinema I think a lot of people don't see a big difference but I like it a lot.
* Having professional landscapers plant grass and plants on an outdoor terrace of a penthouse apartment for $100k
* Growing a large vegetable garden from seeds & seedlings, from your vacation home outside the city
* Raising houseplants in your apartment windowsill
All three of these people may describe themselves as having green thumbs or being into gardening as a hobby...